I have been quiet recently but I have been busy. In addition to the uncertainty of this year that I have previously written about, there were also personal matters this past year that required my time and attention. As those issues have settled down, I have had more time to write professionally again. I am excitedly preparing articles and talks but, for the moment, I must digress to a more banal topic. I have been engaging in repeated epic battles with my WordPress instance and, lately, I’ve been losing.
Much has already been said about the drama in the WordPress ecosystem in recent years. My personal experience with WordPress bears out the reports I’ve been hearing of it as an acute case casty study in enshittification. WordPress has gone from a useful tool to a larger and larger impediment to actual work.
I am incredibly grateful for my time as a volunteer zine cataloger. If that taught me anything it’s that when the means of publication no longer work for you, it’s time to seize the means of publication for yourself!
Thankfully, while WordPress has spent the past few years ruining their product, an already existing open-source alternative has been growing in maturity: 11ty, an open source static-page generator framework that I think works beautifully for my intended use case and workflow. I have already used it to create a “pre-prod” instance that you can inspect for yourself. I’ve even successfully imported my previous blog content into it! I’m looking forward to migrating from pre-prod to prod shortly. 🙂
Aside from allowing me to write more easily I hope that self-hosting an 11ty instance will give me back control over my work and how I decide publish it – in accordance with my values of accessibility, sustainability, trustworthiness and open standards. I know this radio frequency has been silent, so I must ask yet again for you to stay tuned for the next update. 📡 It won’t be long this time – I swear! 😅